Their network, their rules

Much of the equipment and wires that the internet runs on is privately owned, nor is it a public utility in the traditional sense. The owners of the property have a lot of leeway to do what they like with that property. Yes, there are standards, but the standards are about interoperability. They describe things you have to do in order to exchange traffic with other entities. They do not dictate internal policies or processes.


picture of a globe with the word "strategy" written n red on it

As the owners of the equipment, companies have a lot of discretion about what they allow on their network, hence their network, their rules. As an example, both Twitter and Facebook are well within their rights to deny or allow traffic on their networks, no matter what the rest of us think about it. As they are not interoperating with other social networks, they make the rules.

This lack of interoperability extends to inbound email filtering as well. The filters can block any mail for any reason, and the sender has no real recourse. There are, of course, folks who can make changes to filters, but they are recipients, customers and business priorities of the filter maintainer.

Recipients are the final arbiters of what mail they want or don’t want. Many of the consumer mail filters are tuned to parse whether a mail is wanted or unwanted based on signals from the recipients. These aren’t the only signals used, mail has to be safe and come from a well behaved MTA. But most of the consumer ISPs care about keeping their users happy.

This is why so much advice, from myself and others, relies on getting the users to interact with the message. Most of the providers want users to be happy and so they will listen when users start complaining. Some providers, like Microsoft, even have formal processes to gather feedback from users on the accuracy of their email filters.

For business filters, customers are the primary driver. Most business filters, even those maintained by consumer ISPs, have an extra layer of filtering. This layer sits on top of the filters sent out to all customers, allowing each individual company to control their own incoming mail. Filtering priorities are set by the company.

Filters do what they’re told to do. Ultimately, business needs and priorities drive what filters do. The reason they can is because mail servers are private property and the owners can manage them the way they want to.

Your server. Your rules.

Related Posts

Gmail, machine learning, filters

I’m sure by now readers have seen the article from Gmail “Spam does not bring us joy — ridding Gmail of 100 million more spam messages with TensorFlow.” If you haven’t seen it, go read it. It’s not often companies write about their filtering philosophy and what tools they’re using to manage incoming bad mail.

Read More

Email filters and small sends

Have you heard about the Baader-Meinhoff effect?

The Baader-Meinhof effect, also known as frequency illusion, is the illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias). Baader–Meinhof effect at Wikipedia

There has to be an corollary for email. For instance, over the last week or so I’ve gotten an influx of questions about how to fix delivery for one to one email. Some have been from clients “Oh, while we’re at it… this happened.” Others have been from groups I’m associated with “I sent this message and it ended up in spam.”

Read More

Abuse it and lose it

Last week I blogged about the changes at ISPs that make “ISP Relations” harder for many senders. But it’s not just ISPs that are making it a little more difficult to get answers to questions, some spam filtering companies are pulling back on offering support to senders.
For instance, Cloudmark sent out an email to some ESPs late last week informing them that Cloudmark was changing their sender support policies. It’s not that they’re overwhelmed with delisting requests, but rather that many ESPs are asking for specific data about why the mail was blocked. In December, Spamcop informed some ESPs that they would stop providing data to those ESPs about specific blocks and spam trap hits.
These decisions make it harder for ESPs to identify specific customers and lists causing them to get blocked. But I understand why the filtering companies have had to take such a radical step.
Support for senders by filtering companies is a side issue. Their customers are the users of the filtering service and support teams are there to help paying customers. Many of the folks at the filtering companies are good people, though, and they’re willing to help blocked senders and ESPs to figure out the problem.
For them, providing information that helps a company clean up is a win. If an ESP has a spamming customer and the information from the filtering company is helping the ESP force the customer to stop spamming that’s a win and that’s why the filtering companies started providing that data to ESPs.
Unfortunately, there are people who take advantage of the filtering companies. I have dozens of stories about how people are taking advantage of the filtering companies. I won’t share specifics, but the summary is that some people and ESPs ask for the same data over and over and over again. The filtering company rep, in an effort to be helpful and improve the overall email ecosystem, answers their questions and sends the data. In some cases, the ESP acts on the data, the mail stream improves and everyone is happy (except maybe the spammer). In other cases, though, the filtering company sees no change in the mail stream. All the filtering company person gets is yet another request for the same data they sent yesterday.
Repetition is tedious. Repetition is frustrating. Repetition is disheartening. Repetition is annoying.
What we’re seeing from both Spamcop and Cloudmark is the logical result from their reps being tired of dealing with ESPs that aren’t visibly fixing their customer spam problems. Both companies are sending some ESPs to the back of the line when it comes to handling information requests, whether or not those ESPs have actually been part of the problem previously.
The Cloudmark letter makes it clear what they’re frustrated about.

Read More